


Rats

by LilithEncodead



Category: Being Human (UK)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-25
Updated: 2013-02-25
Packaged: 2017-12-03 15:03:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/699532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LilithEncodead/pseuds/LilithEncodead
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A short scene written for “Being-Hal’’’s Series 5 Episode 1 Prediction competition / prompt on DeviantART</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rats

The lights were out, the curtains drawn, the door bolted, and his bed empty. All the other furniture had been taken from the room, for fear Hal would break it apart, hurting himself in an unquellable swathe of anger, which - admittedly - was becoming more, and more frequent as his mercurial moods continued, potent and unpredictable. The darkness was not unfamiliar. The light-bulbs had been removed too, not too long ago. Hal’s skin crawled with the intense chill of both frustration and repulsion, as he remembered the unpleasant incident that had lead to this.   
Desperation had caused him to - with quaking, sweating hands, and manic eyes - detach the electric bulbs from their sockets, and smash them asunder. Vivid as the walls appeared before him now, he could remember dragging the thin curved glass across the skin of his forearm, watching the blood slowly rise, thick and red, before sucking the wound like a ravenous animal. No invigoration, no rapture ensued - like a starving man sick on rotten food, he was not sated. His own blood was no good.  
How he wished he’d had the whit to spit rather than swallow. The burning, sour vomit had crawled up his throat with the painful, gradual pace of a wolf-spider extending its legs, as he retched, with mixed dark bile and blood running down his chin. On his hands and knees, his shoulders hunched, his back arched like a cat’s, as his arms stretched out before him, straight and rigid, as every muscle he possessed broke out in uncontrollable spasms; before he collapsed on the floor, near motionless, while his still leaking wound began to wet the carpet.  
Delirious, with eyes shut tight, he moaned loudly: _“…Leo …Annie.”_ He was barely coherent when Tom and Alex came to set him right.  
That had been two weeks ago (but he didn’t know that for certain). Hal was certain of few things. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept between then and now - what was real, and what was not. He sat on the floor like a frightened child, with his knees drawn up to his stomach. His own shaking breath rattled constantly in his ears, like bone wind-chimes in the breeze. The dulled lights of the streetlamps below shone up palely through the windowpane, seeping into the room, causing the lace curtains to glow above his shoulders, bright white as the moon. God only knew when he’d last slept.   
He had begun to hallucinate some days ago. These dark visions appeared to him, fleeting and harmless as memories - sometimes vague, and sometimes terrifyingly clear and sharp. They were nothing but nightmares, dreams. They posed no threat to him - he knew this, but his sense of reason was weak in his mind, like a dying light, he felt its potency fading away, as his insomnia strengthened.   
First came the rats. They plagued the borders of his vision, quick and dark as shadows at the corner of his eye, fleeing skittishly before he could catch them with a proper glance. Any man in his right mind knows you cannot catch rats, or the shadows of rats, or your own hallucinations - but Hal was not a man in his right mind. They gnawed at his sanity. So many times, he had lunged at them, or flinched away, remembering with prickling, tingling sensations in his fingers the sharp pains of the rat-bites he had received during times of sickness and fear.  
The rats were nothing, however - mere trifles, compared to the snakes. They came afterwards, large and black; stronger and thicker than his own legs. Their rumbling muscles made the walls shake, and their wheezing, whispering hisses broke into his dreams if he ever dared to doze. Often, he awoke to find their face - ‘their,’ for the faces changed - but centimetres away from his own, wide as a hound’s, embedded with evil, beady eyes boring deep into him, with a burning red hunger he knew all too well.   
There was no escaping them. This room was their domain now - as was his bed. He had argued persistently with Tom when he was taking the rest of the furniture away, that it was ‘inhumane’ to make him live without a bed. His body would - surely - turn crooked if he were forced to sleep on the floor for more than a night. How he regretted his insistence now. Different ghouls forever populated his bed; the shapes of writhing snakes beneath the sheets, or rats tumbling from the edge, or - as it appeared before him now - a woman. Lying flat and docile on her back, with flowing hair and vacant eyes. Her pale body was spread out, glowing bare and naked. Her throat was ripped open. The wound was the colour of crushed pot-pouri poppies, and her skin sucked white. Hal crouched on the floor, staring up at her awfully.   
His wide eyes sparkled in the gloom, and his breathing quivered. Her blood was imprinted on his mind, flashing in scarlet bursts, both frightening and sickeningly alluring. He knew she was not real, but still - he could not help willing her to disappear. If his mind had put her there, it could also extinguish her. He could send her away. She wasn’t even real.   
Hal put his head to his knees. When he swallowed, he- involuntarily - imagined his warm saliva was blood. Grimacing, he attempted to suppress the images in his brain; shrill, screaming women, bloody sheets, open wounds - _drip, drip, dripping_ with blood like honey from a honeycomb - thick and sticky, ready to be savoured by him, and only him. Without him, it would go to waste, and what would be the use of that? What would be the use of all that violence and death, without him to reap his rewards? __  
But he could never  
\- but he had before  
\- but he would never…   
not anymore. Never again…   
Hal’s shaking ceased, as a vow formed organically in his mind, strengthening his resolve. He could do this.


End file.
